That’s when conservative author Peter Schweitzer and The New York Times documented how Bill Clinton collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in Russian speaking fees and his charitable foundation collected millions in donations from parties interested in the deal while Hillary Clinton presided on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

“We will no longer go behind closed doors and use consent decrees and settlement agreements to resolve lawsuits filed against the agency by special interest groups where doing so would circumvent the regulatory process set forth by Congress,” Pruitt said, adding that he is also cracking down on attorneys’ fees paid to litigants.

Under Pruitt’s new directive, the agency will post all lawsuits online, reach out to affected states and industries and seek their input on any potential settlements.

Over the next several decades, Deng’s plan worked well. Deng passed his power to Jiang Zeming and nominated Hu Jintao as Jiang’s successor. After 10 years, Jiang passed the power to Hu Jintao after he nominated Xi as Hu’s successor. At the end of Hu’s first five-year term, Hu elevated Xi Jinping to the Standing Committee of Politburo in 2007 as the heir apparent. Xi spent the next five years by Hu’s side until it was his turn to assume power as the general Communist party secretary and the president of China in 2013.

Later:

Since he became China’s president in 2013, Xi has been aggressively consolidating power into his own hands by dismantling the power structures laid down by his predecessors. He became the chief of everything. In addition to his title as the head of state and the general party secretary, he led numerous committees and leadership groups, including the newly formed National Security Commission. In 2016, the Chinese Communist Party elevated Xi to the “core” leader, which puts Xi at the same political status as Mao and Deng. The “core” title signified that Xi broke away from the collective leadership model instilled by Deng and indicated that Xi has become the most powerful leader since Deng Xiaoping.

Austria’s Peoples Party won a national election and 31-year-old Sebastian Kurz will be the new chancellor. Kurz adopted a strategy that worked for Mark Rutte in the Netherlands — he steered his party far enough to the right to bleed votes away from an insurgent far-right party. That far-right right party, the Freedom Party, still finished second in the election.

The Russian operation, described by multiple people who have been briefed on the matter, is known to have stolen classified documents from a National Security Agency employee who had improperly stored them on his home computer, on which Kaspersky’s antivirus software was installed. What additional American secrets the Russian hackers may have gleaned from multiple agencies, by turning the Kaspersky software into a sort of Google search for sensitive information, is not yet publicly known.

Alvi was arraigned Friday on four felony counts, and Awan, who has already been arraigned, requested that his GPS monitoring bracelet be taken off — citing the fact that his wife was in America as the reason he was not a flight risk.

Yet the couple entered and left the court separately, have different lawyers, and Awan’s lawyer told the judge that the husband and wife are staying “in a one-bedroom apartment and then also a house.”

Pakistani legal papers published by the news channel show Alvi recently accused Awan of illegally marrying another woman, and of fraud. “My husband Imran Awan son of Muhammad Ashraf Awan, committed fraud along with offence of polygamy,” she charges in the papers.

A former chief of staff to Senator Mike Lee, Boyd Matheson, is considering a run for U.S. Senate in Utah. The current occupant of that seat, Orrin Hatch, hasn’t said whether he’ll run for re-election in 2018. Matheson currently runs a conservative think tank in Salt Lake City, the Sutherland Institute.

That brings us to something else that might get lost in the Pew numbers: the median Democratic voter has radicalized much faster than the median Republican voter, and most of this radicalization happened while a Democratic president was in office. That counterintuitive trend points to a larger problem with how the Left in particular understands the American project and our prospects for living together in peace and prosperity. Although it’s true that Republicans have moved further to the right as Democrats have moved further to the left, it’s the leftward slide that should worry us.

Later:

The rapid radicalization of Democrats along these lines follows a ruthless logic about the entire premise of the American constitutional order. If you believe, as progressives increasingly do, that America was founded under false pretenses and built on racial oppression, then why bother conserving it? And why bother trying to compromise with those on the other side, especially if they reject progressives’ unifying theory that America is forever cursed by its original sin of slavery, which nothing can expiate?

Donald Trump picked a Twitter fight with retiring Senator Bob Corker (R-TN), who responded with a Tweet saying, “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.” It’s unusual for a senator to give as well as he gets in a Trump Twitter fight.

In court documents, prosecutors had previously said Wells lied to police about when she became aware of the Legionnaires’ outbreak and that she threatened a team of independent researchers who were studying the source of the disease.

The force will initially be built around a Romanian brigade of up to 4,000 soldiers, supported by troops from nine other NATO countries, and complementing a separate deployment of 900 U.S. troops who are already in place. The plans are to include additional air and sea assets to give the force greater capabilities.

The “resistance” has a distinctly leftist, fascist element of violence, threats and property destruction. The media, of course, describes the protests as “mostly peaceful.” Imagine the coverage if the tea party protestors had broken so much as a tea cup, let alone blocked streets, physically assaulted Democrats, or trashed college campuses.

May I also remind you that when Tea Partiers protested, there was no vulgarity, they were safe for children, our speakers never had to be bleeped out when on the news, we all kept our clothes on, we didn’t burn anything down, there were no windows left smashed, and we took our signs and trash with us when we left.

Conservatives often favor super-majority requirements because they think it (1) stalls government action and (2) assures us that when government does act, its measures benefit a very broad segment of the public. But hard experience show that the filibuster has not restrained the growth of the federal government. Instead it has helped create a one-way ratchet whereby the federal government sometimes expands, sometimes remains constant, but never shrinks.

The registry, called ASSIMIL8, provides gay couples with a list of business owners whose privately held personal beliefs may reflect traditional Christian views on marriage. The excited fiancés can then pick whose lives they want to totally destroy with a lengthy and frivolous lawsuit, as they anticipate their cheerful nuptials.

Some 26 generals and 260 top officers have left their posts in the last 16 months, frustrated with an apparent favouring of soldiers loyal to Law and Justice, Poland’s governing party, and the defence ministry’s failure to consult them on changes to the army’s structure.